"With a Song in Their Hearts: Bolcom and Morris"

Seattle native and UW alumnus William Bolcom served as the
Hans and Thelma Lehmann Distinguished Professor in the UW music
department during 1993-94. He received the Pulitzer Prize in
1988 for his work, 12 New Etudes for Piano.

Bolcom studied composition at the UW under John Verrall;
later, he studied with Darius Milhaud. Bolcom has composed I
Will Breathe A Mountain, premiered by Marilyn Horne at the
Carnegie Hall Centennial; Third Sonata for Violin and
Piano, commissioned for and premiered by Nadia
Salerno-Sonnenberg at the Aspen Music Festival; and Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, described as "a masterpiece of
our time and place" by The New York Times.

Bolcom's 1992 opera, McTeague, commissioned and
premiered by the Chicago Civic Light Opera, earned praise from
the New York Magazine for its "gallant effort to restore
music to its rightful place as the dominant and defining
element in the operatic mix." The opera was televised by the
Public Broadcasting Service as The Real McTeague, a
television special conceived by Robert Altman. The Los Angeles
Times wrote: "The composer, a master of his complex craft,
wrote an accessible score that cannily bridged period pop,
mild-mannered modernism and old-fashioned operatic
convention."

Integrating current classical styles with popular idioms,
from ragtime and jazz to blues and salsa, Bolcom's performances
with singer/actress Joan Morris have won national recognition.
Newsweek magazine notes:

She is a classically trained singer/actress who has done
opera and serious concert music. He is a renowned
composer/pianist who studied with Darius Milhaud and one of
whose scores had its world premiere at the Stuttgart Opera.
Yet, when Joan Morris and William Bolcom get together on the
concert stage, the usual matter at hand is a marvelously
varied repertory of American popular songs, from vaudeville
numbers of Lillian Russell's era to the show tunes of
Broadway's heyday. She sings them straight, her mezzo-soprano
aglow with wonderment at the simple dramatic beauty of a Kern
or a Gershwin phrase. He provides an elegant partnership at
the keyboard that transcends the rather denigrating
recital-hall term 'accompanist.' "Don't worry about whether
this is classical or popular," they seem to be telling us.
"Just listen; isn't it wonderful?" Yes, it is.